ABC's Election Analyst blogs on the wonderful world of Australian Elections.

December 11, 2012

More on Direct Enrolment and Update

Opposition spokesman Christopher Pyne on Monday accused the Labor Party of rorting the electoral roll for the next election through the introduction of direct enrolment and update.

In the Australian Mr Pyne stated that "Suddenly Labor thinks they are behind in the polls, why don't we do something to trick the voter, let's rort the roll, let's get an advantage over the Coalition, they've [Labor] been doing it for decades and this is just their latest iteration."

Rort is a wonderfully Australian word. Website www.dictionary.com and the Oxford English Dictionary both list it as being an Australian word and several dictionaries list it with the meaning "a rowdy, usually drunken party". The Oxford notes this as an out of date meaning and the Collins dictionary lists a verb form "to take unfair advantage of something".

Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary defines rort as a noun for "a scheme which manipulates the law or any set of regulations to gain a wrongful advantage", with the verb form "to gain control over (an organisation, as a branch of a political party) especially by falsifying records. " The Oxford’s listing provides a similar modern meaning without the reference to political parties.

I also presume that Mr Pyne is engaging in rhetorical flourish with his quotes. It is one thing to accuse the Labor Party of a 'rort' in changing the law to allow direct enrolment and update, but if he is making the accusation that direct updating is a ‘rort’ of the electoral rolls, then he is by implication suggesting fraudulent activity taking place where these transactions are generated.

That would suggest fraud taking place at Centrelink and state driver licensing registries. If this is taking place, then does this already impact on the extensive use of these records to verify elector generated enrolments in the existing roll system?

Stripped of its rhetoric, the debate is really over what is the best source for data on new and changed enrolment transactions.

The Coalition is arguing to retain the old system of elector-generated transactions. To enrol or change address, an elector must sign a document stating that they are who they say they are, and that they live where they say they live.

Proponents of direct enrolment argue that electors already do this verification of identity and residence with licence and Centrelink updates, so why should voters have to go through the process a second time. Especially when driver licencing and Centrelink records are currently the main source used to verify the existing electoral enrolment form.

The old roll system did not rely entirely on elector generate transactions. For years the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has relied on records from driver licencing authorities and Centrelink to generate reminder letters to electors who have changed address. If electors did not respond, then these transactions were used by the AEC to remove people from the roll.

What the new direct enrolment and update system does is go one step further and directly enrol or re-enrol a voter at their new address.

The Labor Party has adopted the arguments of various electoral bodies and academics around the country that relying only on elector generated transactions in the modern era is in fact undermining the quality and completeness of the electoral roll.

As the volume of snail mail declines in this age of e-mail, fewer and fewer electors are bothering to get the required stamps and envelopes to return the enrolment form generated for them from the change of details they provided to Centrelink or driver licensing authorities.

Both Centrelink and driver licensing authorities require identity and residency checks, including declaration of date and place of birth as well as details of citizenship. The equivalent of a 100 point identity check is also undertaken.

It may be that the AEC is about to flush out people who register their driver’s licence and car at an address for the purposes of lowering their insurance rates or to obtain a parking permit. But to describe this as rorting the electoral roll is a strong accusation.

The question has to be whether direct enrolment and update is a valid response to a changing era

The first Australian electoral rolls were drawn up under the authority of local Magistrates and voters were required to possess or rent property above a certain value and to have lived at an address for more than six months. The property qualifications quickly disappeared, but long periods of residence were still required, and state officers such as the police and mining registrars maintained the annual rolls through the 19th century. Shorter one month qualification became the norm in the late 1890s following campaigns by the new Labor Party to allow itinerant rural workers the right to vote.

The first Commonwealth Rolls were created by the state police forces and regularised with the introduction of continuous roll maintenance and compulsory enrolment in 1911. From then until 2012, the key generator of enrolment transactions were voters themselves, filling in and returning enrolment forms, the system the Coalition is arguing should be retained.

For decades the AEC used enrolment forms in conjunction with habitation reviews to keep the roll up to date. Habitation reviews were a census-like exercise of knocking on every door in the country and checking the adults in the residence against the list of enrolled voters. This increasingly expensive exercise was abandoned as the electoral roll was translated from a set of card indexes in the Divisional Returning Office to an electronic roll updated from multiple sources.

Door knocking every house was abandoned in 1999 and replaced by Continuous Roll Update, a process that relied on multiple data sources to update the roll. Enrolments were checked against a register of habitable addresses to identify residences with no (or too many) enrolled voters. The AEC also tapped into other government databases to identify voters who had changed address.

Initially the AEC had problems with the new system. The AEC continued to write to voters at their former address, which given time lags in receiving records from other authorities, usually meant that voters never received the letters at their new addresses. In this period the electoral roll started to shrink as the AEC's process removed people from the roll without telling them. Subsequent changes at least ensured the AEC wrote to electors at their new address

Continuous Roll Update permitted the AEC to identify individuals who were not enrolled, or who were enrolled at the wrong address, but the AEC could do nothing with this information other than notify the elector and request they return an enrolment form. Unless the elector did this, the only option available to the AEC was to remove them from the electoral roll.

The last NSW Labor government made the state the first Australian jurisdiction to move to direct enrolment and update, backed by an all-party parliamentary committee. At the end of 2010, the NSW Electoral Commission (NSWEC) began to enrol qualified 18 year-old school and TAFE students. (At this stage the AEC does not propose to do this.) The NSWEC also started to mine the Roads and Traffic Authority database for driver's licence and motor vehicle registration records, and used this data for direct enrolment and update. The NSWEC also uses first home owner's grant data to initiate enrolment transactions. To date the new O'Farrell government has been happy to allow this process to continue.

The Victorian Labor government also started a similar though less ambitious direct enrolment process in 2010. The newly elected Baillieu government has also continued with this program to date.

As I noted in a previous post, the NSWEC has most actively pursued direct updating. In the last year it has undertaken three state by-elections and statewide local government elections. It is about to undertake a major state redistribution and has been keen to ensure that enrolments by area are as accurate as possible for the redistribution.

As a result of this state activity, at the end of October 2012, there were 124,000 new enrolments on the NSW roll that do not appear on the Commonwealth roll, and around 180,000 voters currently on the state roll at a different address to where there are listed on the Commonwealth roll.

If all this direct updating is a rort, it is an odd sort of rort that creates a more accurate electoral roll than the one based on elector generated transactions.

In introducing direct enrolment and updating, the AEC will have to deal with the NSW and Victorian differences. Such difference will not arise in Tasmania, Queensland the ACT or Northern Territory where the AEC also provides the state roll. South Australia is altering its state act to accept the Commonwealth transactions, while a set of common procedures with Western Australia are yet to be arrived at.

If the current elector-generated transaction system for the Commonwealth had been maintained, then between now and next year's election, the AEC would have had to pursue the 300,000 NSW voters to get them to send in a Commonwealth enrolment form. Based on what has happened in the past, an avalanche of enrolment forms would finally arrive just as the election was about to be called.

One of the arguments put by the Coalition against direct enrolment is that, given the roll cannot be challenged through the Court of Disputed Returns, candidates have the right to demand an accurate roll and the right to know at the close of rolls who is on the roll.

Accepting the Coalition's argument, it could be argued direct enrolment gives sitting MPs an advantage in verifying new enrolments. NSW state MPs are currently receiving monthly updates of new enrolments well in advance of anything received by Commonwealth members. Under the old Commonwealth rules, hundreds of thousands of new NSW enrolments would not have been notified to Commonwealth MPs until the start of the next election campaign.

Interestingly, the AEC is proposing the monthly updates of changed enrolments provided to Commonwealth members will separately identify those that have been generated through direct enrolment and update, as opposed to those based on the existing enrolment form.

By far the worst aspect of the debate on direct enrolment has been attempts to justify or denigrate it based on how people enrolled by the system might vote. Franchise should be judged by qualification, not by intended vote. Who people are going to vote for shouldn’t be used as a measure of whether rort is taking place.

If an attempt to change the current enrolment system is to be labelled a rort, then why shouldn’t attempts to maintain the status quo, and its steady decline in youth enrolment, also not be seen as a rort?